The feature debut of director Hamza Zaman is not one for the small fry, although small fry is what this OB/GYN horror flick is all about. If occasional gore and downbeat gruesomeness does not alert buyers, brief but explicit softcore sex and nudity might. That said, purely as a genre entry, it delivers sufficient shocks and genuine surprises to get a christening from fans of this type of picture.
Marie (Victorya Brandart) and her loving husband Danny (Ignacyo Matynia) want a child but have struggled through disappointing fertility treatments, the latest resulting in a stillbirth (offscreen). Desperate to please his heartbroken wife, Danny locates the unorthodox Lands Institute for Reproductive Sciences online.
Operated far from anywhere by the thin, intense Dr. Arthur Lands (Mark Lobene) and his tiny, android-like staff, the place feels more like a cult commune, with clients (including two lesbians) taking up long-term residence, wearing identical uniforms, consuming only locally provided food and liquids, doing yoga (watch for director Zaman in a cameo as the instructor) and the women undergoing mystery treatments in an antenna-like array that proud Dr. Lands claims is the only one of its kind.
The predicted course in such a plot would exploit female they're-out-to-get-me anxieties (think Rosemary's Baby). But in a neat twist, it's actually husband Danny who suspects something fishy about the Institute while watching Marie, previously suffering paranoid nightmares, become a happy, cooperative Stepford-esque patient. Danny finds evidence that Dr. Land perversely watches his patients having sex via hidden cameras. What's really happening is far worse.
There's a rule that any motion picture that provides at least three memorable sequences is a winner, and The Institute qualifies—even if the moody music is overly insistent at first (a trait Zaman mercifully drops). In the last act especially, the material zigs where one might expect it to zag, and what initially seemed like an abnormal-psych thriller not unlike David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers turns into something more blatantly sci-fi, with an ending right out of a particularly nasty comic book. A decent, underseen entry for horror-friendly shelves in public libraries, but again, note the graphic sexual content.
Discover more titles with our list of horror movies.